Articles such as consumer products, including cleaning and personal care compositions, may be packaged in a primary package, in the form of semi-rigid or rigid containers, for example. A plurality of primary packages containing the consumer products may be grouped and packaged in an outer, secondary package such as a carton, bundle, case, or display case to be shipped to a retail store or directly to a consumer. Systems and methods for packaging consumer products may include filling the consumer product into a primary package, capping the primary package, grouping a plurality of primary packages, and finally packing the group of primary packages into secondary packaging. Once primary packages are filled and capped, the primary packages may advance to a secondary packaging system.
Instability of primary packages can cause problems in conventional secondary packaging systems. Certain primary packages are inherently unstable due to, for example, the overall shape, shape of a base of the primary package, a high center of gravity of the primary package, or the minimal weight of the secondary package even with product contained therein. Secondary packaging systems may include an infeed carrier apparatus such as a conveyor that is configured to advance a plurality of primary packages in a first machine direction to be arranged into a group and finally packaged in a secondary package. A plurality of primary packages may advance on the infeed carrier in an upright configuration with a base of the primary packages resting on an outer surface of the infeed carrier. The primary packages may be unrestricted from movement relative to adjacent primary packages, which can result in adjacent primary packages colliding, and sometimes, falling over. The external surface geometry of certain primary packages are not compatible with contacting adjacent primary packages. Contact between such primary packages can result in primary packages being knocked over or can cause the primary packages to twist or shingle. Some primary package shapes are so unstable that such primary packages are often not commercialized in order to avoid such issues in the packaging process.
Conventional secondary packaging systems are often configured to handle primary packages of a particular size and shape. In addition, conventional secondary packaging systems are often configured for making groups of articles having a predetermined number of articles arranged in a particular configuration. For example, some sorting mechanisms include diverters for separating primary packages into single-file lanes to form multiple groups of primary packages. The diverters may be sized and/or arranged for primary packages of predetermined sizes or shapes. Moreover, the diverters may be arranged to sort the primary packages into a predetermined number of single-file lanes. In order to use the same secondary packaging system to package primary packages of different shapes and/or sizes, the diverters may need to be replaced with diverters of different sizes or rearranged in order to create different size groups. Thus, in order to package primary packages of different sizes and shapes and to create various different configurations of primary packages, multiple changeover parts may be needed and the secondary packaging system may need to be reconfigured. This adds time and cost to the secondary packaging operation.
Another issue with conventional secondary packaging systems is that they may have to be run at relatively slow speeds in order to maintain control of the primary packages. If run at higher speeds, the primary packages may become instable, resulting in primary packages falling over or being improperly arranged into groups. Running secondary packaging systems at slow speeds may cause the secondary packaging system to be the rate limiting process in the overall packaging process, which can decrease the overall throughput rate to the process.
Moreover, another issue associated with secondary packaging systems is that the processing conditions of the secondary packaging system may be dependent on the process conditions in an upstream process. For example, if an article is rejected for failing to meet quality standards, for example, or a primary package falls over and is rejected from the system, the secondary packaging system may have to be stopped or slowed down until the upstream processing conditions are stable or missing bottles are replaced.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a system and method that is capable of grouping articles of various shapes and sizes, including articles that are inherently stable and those that are inherently unstable.
It would be beneficial to provide a system and method that is capable of grouping articles of various shapes and sizes into groups of various sizes and configurations with minimal changeover parts and necessary reconfigurations.
It would be beneficial to provide a secondary packaging system and method that is capable of running at relatively high speeds.
It would also be beneficial to provide a system and method of grouping articles that is capable of continuous operation at relatively high speeds even when upstream processing conditions may result in missing articles or a slower infeed rate of articles.